


Warmth

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Introspection, Mosaic, Stranded, novel-related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-28 02:36:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10821978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "He says nothing, but he pulls her hand around him and grips it in his. His fingers are ice, cold, hard. Yet she feels at peace. Finally. After all the years of hiding from him. Here it is; ice, and peace.She feels calm.“You are the first person I’ve ever told,” she whispers as the fire dies out. “And you’ll be the last.”"





	Warmth

**Author's Note:**

> From the Prixin Prompt comp: 
> 
> Chakotay keeps watch over Kathryn on a hostile planet. She is injured and probably won’t make it back to Voyager, but he refuses to leave her side (despite the fact that he might make it out alive if he does so). (reverse the roles if you want).
> 
> Thank you, as always, to the wonderful MiaCooper who always encourages me and also shares my totally cruel sense of humour. 
> 
> Disclaimer: None of the characters herein belong to me. And I make no monetary gain from this.

 

* * *

 

She feels as if she’s drifting, in and out of whiteness, the feeling of helplessness – masquerading as ice – creeping from the ends of her fingertips, coursing up and over her arms.  The opaque solitude is almost tangible, deeply unsettling as it tingles behind her eyelids, whiter and whiter. The colour of milk. Or pack ice.

She sees it then; two shadows, sliding into black, calm water.  Two shadowy figures against dense whiteness. The water surges, engulfing them.

They’re a parody now of what it was. Of what it felt like to be there.

It’s a nightmare, and a memory, and a distant event in someone else’s story.

Paralysing, making her mute, as screams - indecision, misery , fear – fill her mind.

She jolts awake. The coldness recedes, replaced with dense numbness in her fingers, in her hands and wrists. She opens her eyes, slowly, because they are gritty and sore. In the dying light it takes her a while to adjust to the blackness and the lessening glow from their torches. Then there’s the smell. The thick, dark smell of fear and hiding. And singed skin.

Blood. It’s the smell of blood which sticks in her throat, which makes it constrict and tighten.

It reminds her of being locked away, trapped in her shallow grave. She tastes it.

It’s darkening her hands, flaking into scales and blisters and cracking across the surface, filling the minute rivulets of her skin to make startling, grotesque patterns.

She dreams of a bath; hot water, clean skin, the feel of her own bed.

Eighteen hours, she thinks. Or it was.

She lifts her tricorder – twenty.

She slept, she admonishes herself, the irony of the fact not lost on her.

A groan interrupts her self-flagellation, and she looks down at the head in her lap. Her fingers dance out to touch his hair line, itching, but she resists.

There’s a gash splitting open the blue ink on his temple, shifting it from something of wonder to something she’s afraid to examine closely. The blood has trickled into his hair, matting it, pooling to dry in the shell of his ear.

Lots of blood.

And it pools, black, like water.

“Chakotay,” she lifts his head, heavy, limp, freeing her numb hand to support him. Then she uses her free hand to grope for the water bottle at her side – taken from the emergency kit she grabbed before the shuttle burst apart with flames – and holds it to his blueing lips.

Ice, she thinks. And shudders.

She dragged him from the flames.

Her hands feel so heavy. And numb.

“Drink.”

He does as he’s ordered – because he always does, without fail – but he’s so weak, he consumes little of it. Most trickles down the side of his mouth, tracks onto his cheeks and into the neck of his uniform.

The effort is lamentable, but the horror of it all is that he’s trying.

“Chakotay,” she feels herself moan plaintively, and he stills.

His shallow breathing grows even shallower, and she doesn’t know how long it can go on.

 

-0-

 

“Chakotay to Voyager,” she watches as he presses the com, his fingers flittering over the controls.

She tilts her head to the side, lifts a leg up and tucks it under the other.

“ _Tuvok here Commander_.”

He mutes the com, leans over, “Get yourself a coffee.” Then he pushes it again. “All on course Tuvok. We’re heading to the Northern continent, and we will scout for the dilithium. We’ve left the mining party, with Mr. Kim, on the Eastern continent.”

This permission – nigh on encouragement – is so unusual that she smiles and reaches over to the replicator to order one.  It takes only moments, and the bitter, dark smell is so delicious that she doesn’t want to break the moment.

“Enjoying that?”

He is smirking, one brow raised, as he watches her.

“One of my few pleasures,” she says darkly, a brow arched in rejoinder.

“Captain,” he grins. “You’re far too willing to eschew your own enjoyment.”

She takes a sip, grins from behind the mug, “How would you know?”

“Vivid imagination,” he turns his attention back to the con.

“I bet,” she tilts her head back, lets her eyes fall closed.

It’s an unspoken amity between them that he’ll take over the work, and she can slip her feet up on the con and close her eyes.

It’s why she wanted to leave the ship…amongst other things. She thinks, fleetingly – distant and from a distance – of Mark. He was attentive in a dutiful way, in a way that smacked of obligation to a vow he’d chosen to take.  Her First Officer, on the other hand, wants to, does it because he enjoys seeing her relax.

Then she realises she’s writing a dangerous narrative, and one that isn’t entirely fair on Mark.

The man who wrote her a letter, and moved on.

She isn’t bitter.

If anything, she’s glad Mark made the choice. Because she didn’t know, not really, if she could have gone through with it.  And just a little bit of her was relieved to be removed from the decision, here, in the Delta Quadrant.

She plays this justification game all the time; surging forward, pulling back, from her own undeniable temptations.

But she will not give in, and she will not choose Chakotay. Or happiness.

She knows what happens when you don’t choose well, or you don’t choose at all. Or you choose too much.

Not that the man beside her has any idea. At least she’s sure of that.

“What did Tuvok say?” he asks, and she laughs a little.

 “‘It is inadvisable for both senior officers to leave the ship’,” she quotes, verbatim, voice monotone and lovingly teasing.

He grins “He is right.”

“If I don’t leave the ship, at least a few times in the projected seventy years in front of us, I may become rather stir-crazy,” she says. “At any rate, you never agree with Tuvok. Why the change of heart?”

“I like to surprise-“

At that, the shuttle jerks violently, rolling almost ninety degrees before the sensors right it, only to be flung in the opposite direction.

“Chakotay,” she slams her hand upward to brace herself as she’s thrown from her seat, the coffee arcing through the air before it showers down onto the con. She watches it settle on his skin, and he jerks his hand away as it blisters almost instantly.

Coffee. Hot.

The sirens of an automated red-alert scream through the shuttle. The windows suddenly glow a fantastic orange, blinding them as she fumbles for the con and her hand clashes with his on the controls. The shuttle spins out of control, and she only manages to set a Starfleet emergency frequency before it begins to spiral into the orange tunnel opening, wide and hellish, before them.

If she wasn’t sure of her death, it would be fascinating.

 

-0-

 

The light from the blazing shuttle recedes as night falls, and she knows she has to take advantage of it before it burns itself out. She slides his heavy head onto her balled up jacket, singed and frayed at the edges, and heads out into the gusting wind. She was thankful for it at first, whipping the fire into a frenzy in the dry climate the night before, but now it stings her face, and eyes. She feels fire in her blood, in the rivulets of her skin, in the gaps between her undershirt and her body.

If anything, she’d reasoned, it would keep hostile natives away. If there are any. But now it hurts.

She breaks arid branches from the few trees close enough – she doesn’t want to go further, which would force her to leave him, and with her wits loose and crumbling – and brings them back in her aching arms. It’s not a cave as such, but an arrangement of rocks which offers some natural shelter, shielding them from the sides and from above, with an opening which gives her a vantage point.

Then she goes back out for rocks and arranges them in a circle, sets the branches in the middle, and heads back out with the biggest one to edge near to the shuttle and poke it into the flames, watching as it darkens, sparks and catches.

She takes it back, and sets it in the middle of her fire.

It takes so long, and she labours with everything she has to make it happen.

If he was awake, he’d be impressed.

But he’s sliding away, into a delirium she envies. His breathing is shallow. His chest heaving with exertion.

His eyes flutter open as the heat reaches him, and he moans painfully.

“Shhh,” she whispers, running a soft hand over his chest.

“Go…” he urges with a dry, pained voice. “Kath, you have to go…”

She doesn’t know where she would go, if she could. What she does know is that she won’t leave him. 

That there is no choice this time.

Or there is a choice, and she’s made it.

He doesn’t know it.

“Never,” she says softly, bending and touching her lips to his jaw.

And she sees the delight – so long suppressed, a delight she refused him, - glisten in his eyes.

“The ship…Kathryn…I’ve always…you…need help,” his eyes slide closed, and she knows there’s nothing more to be said.

It’s an unfair death for him, an unfair way to lose him. Then again, she’s lost before.

She imagines her Bridge, and the empty seat at her side. She imagines coming home, and realising her home was lost long before. There was ice once, now there’s heat.

And it hurts, like nothing she’s ever felt before. It’s not the inertia of her father’s death, or the needling terror of Justin’s. It’s a pure, breath-taking pain.

It strips her to her foundations, and she sobs into his chest.

Eventually, like all her tears, they end.

He groans as she lies down beside him, rolling him onto his side so his airway is clear. She pushes herself behind him, curling what little she has of herself physically around his hulking body.

And then she finds herself telling him, begging him, pleading with him.

Her Maquis warrior, her loyal First Officer, now her confessor.

Telling him that she couldn’t save them. That, instead of choosing, she chose neither – paralysed with inactivity as they were smothered by freezing water.

And she tells him that she doesn’t miss Justin anymore, that she stopped missing him very quickly.

And Mark. That Mark was a safe option, a kind option.

And with him, it will be different. With him, she will wake thinking of him, and fall asleep with him on her mind.

That she is sorry she gave so little, when he had so much to take.

He says nothing, but he pulls her hand around him and grips it in his. His fingers are ice, cold, hard. Yet she feels at peace. Finally. After all the years of hiding from him. Here it is; ice, and peace.

She feels calm.

“You are the first person I’ve ever told,” she whispers as the fire dies out. “And you’ll be the last.”

 

-0-

 

She dreams of him, like a little girl dreams of her wedding or of a life she thinks she might have.  A life she deserves, and does not.

The dream moves like dreams do, in fragmented pieces and from frame to unexplainable frame, but the narrative is no less enjoyable. She is his wife. They are in Indiana. He loves her.

She is home. Home, with the sun beating down on them. Coffee and wine, and his cooking and his quiet power.

They make languorous, lazy love in the morning. He reads. She flies a desk.

It is here, in these dreams, she feels the creeping warmth she wanted.

She saved him.

And he saves her.

And she is finally redeemed.

At first the world intrudes in increments; the other voices, imperious and demanding in turns, the enquiries. Then the familiar, distinct smell unique to sickbay. Then she sees.

Then she is awake.

“Chakotay?” She asks as the Doc swims into her vision.

“The Commander is on the Bridge,” he answers. “But right now, I’m concerned with you. As _you_ should be.”

Then she is aware of her body. And the fire in her limbs. She hears the whirring, beeping, plunging of life support machines – orchestral – as they surround her.

She feels every notch of her spine against the bio-bed, and the cracking sensation of her bones fighting against her own skin.

The pain is magnificent.

She feels a scream pushing into her throat.

But before it can surface, the doctor pushes a hypospray against her neck. It speeds through her body, cooling each agony.

“Please don’t put – me to sleep – again –“ she labours, and he shakes his head.

“You were badly burned,” he explains. “Most of your skin is regenerated. It is very sensitive, and very delicate. You have been in an induced coma for three weeks. You are malnourished, and exhausted. You need time to heal.”

Fire, she thinks. Of course.

“Chakotay?”

It seems to be reflexive. She knows he’s dead. Or does she know?

Everything feels twisted.

“Would you like me to call him?”

“He’s alive?”

The incredulity of her voice throws her recollections into doubt. And her dreams. And her choices.

The Doctor gives her a furtive glance, “Yes. He suffered a bad head injury, but it was you who was very near death. Mr. Tuvok found you just in time…I must caution, Captain, against such reckless-”

“Enough,” she holds up a pale, tight hand.

The recollections are so faded at the edges, so blurred. She remembers building the fire, setting herself against his back.  She remembers her confession, and her confessional.

The Doctor rolls his eyes, and nods.

“Would you like me to call him?”

She surprises herself when she says ‘No’. It comes from between gritted teeth, burning her larynx as it forces itself upwards and from behind her teeth.

“He will want to know-“

“Not just now,” she whispers, feeling suddenly weak. “I need…”

The suddenness of the tears in her eyes shocks her too, and she weeps with relief and with longing and with an ache so tangible it bleeds through her new skin, tightening her body to curl up, a shell on the biobed.

“Do you want-“

“Leave me,” she orders.

“Captain-“

“Please.”

He deactivates in a shimmer and she is left alone, pushed against the wave of her own sudden immutable grief.

Grief at the sudden exposure, that Chakotay knows now, and can’t possibly un-know her terror.

And relief at being alive, at knowing that he is alive too.

Tears come, hot and heavy, and she twists her head and pushes it into the surface of the biobed. The feeling of ice creeps, first from her fingers and up her arms, and she remembers their faces and their bodies, and the water gurgling into the shuttle.

And she despises the woman who stood there, and could not choose.

Who still cannot choose. Who cannot choose though she has been given a second chance.

 

-0-

 

She strips in front of the mirror, peeling the material of the gown from her body. Pink, new, fresh skin is revealed as the blue slides away. And she caresses it with fingers which are unfamiliar, and hyper-real.

She’s suffered immolation, and it feels delicate and new to her.

Chakotay has visited several times; those black, dark eyes searching her new skin for a sign she remembers she told him. That she has not made another story.

But she cuts herself off, retreats from the questions dancing in his eyes. She cannot choose him, because she would be choosing to open up her world to warmth, and heat.

And all the things he has to give her. The things she desperately wants, but does not choose, and does not deserve.

The chime of her door shudders her to the present, and she turns from her mirror and pulls her robe on. The familiar silk, wrapping her in comfort, gives her a moment of respite.

She picks her way slowly, the soles of her feet new and tender on the worn carpet underneath, to the door and examines the viewer.

A First Officer, a rose plundered from Aeroponics, and a bottle of wine.

It’s like a painting she hung on her wall once, and threw a sheet over. And forgot about.

She presses the comm in, and girds herself, “Chakotay, I’m very tired tonight. Unless it’s ship’s business…”

“It’s ship’s business,” he says softly, in the empty corridor, and she knows it’s a lie.

But she lets him lie to her, because all she’s known, for so long, are the lies she’s lived.

And she’s too tired for this argument.

She gives in and lets him in, watching as he settles on the couch and puts the wine and the rose on the table.

It looks like an apology, and she doesn’t understand why their apologies are so prolific, and everything else is so sparse.

He lifts the bloom, petals pink and heavy and fresh, and holds it out to her.

“I imagined you might need…” his words fade, and the shade of the flower reminds her of the skin across her own hips.

She takes it between her fingers.

“I thought I’d lost-“ those words disappear too, dying into a sob she doesn’t want him to hear.

“Kathryn,” he says gently, “I didn’t know.”

“No,” she whispers. “No one does. No one. Not my friends, not my family…”

“It wasn’t your-“

She feels the words surging into her throat, more powerful than the lies she’s built or the story she tells herself at times.

“Of course, of course it was,” she screams, and suddenly she is on fire, her body raging with the indignity of it all. “And it is why I can’t have you, why I can’t have freedom or happiness. I couldn’t save them!”

He sits, mouth hanging slightly open as the impetus of her anger comes to a grinding halt at his boots.

“I couldn’t choose, so I chose nothing…” she whispers, feeling suddenly weak.

She sways on her feet, suddenly so tired of everything and all the pain she’s held in her heart and in her bones.

He jumps to his feet, thrusts his arms out to hold her shoulders and keep her in place. A little whimper of pain at the contact means he softens his grip, and she’s forgotten how it feels to be touched as if you’re loved.

She lets her head fall against his chest, swaying into the heat and smell of him.

“I need you to…”

So many things, she thinks; love me, leave me, stop me, and run from me.

“Hold me,” is what emerges.

He slides his hands from her shoulders, slick on the silk, and down her back and she feels heat and softness from his fingers.

“I thought I would lose you, and I failed again…”

“You should have left,” he whispers into her ear, delicate, and she hears fear in his voice.

She knows it comes from all the corners of their relationship. From the times she’s rejected him, from the fact she nearly died and did not know it, from the nearness of her.

“I couldn’t,” she says, and moves her head to his shoulder. “I couldn’t do it again. I…”

She realises what she’s done, and why the pain and the misery is so prevalent now, where it’s been absent for so long.

Because she finally chose.

“Shhh,” he hushes. “You don’t have to explain.”

“Don’t I?”

She doesn’t pull back, she can’t. He holds her against his body, hands flush and flat and covering the base of her back.

“No. never to me,” he says into her hair. “No, never.”

She reaches up, her fingers curling around his neck and brushing against the hair at the nape.

“I am too tired,” she whispers, raising her eyes to his. “I’m tired of not choosing.”

He looks confused for a moment, then realisation dawns.

But he pulls back to take her face in his hands.

“And in the morning?”

“I won’t regret you. I never have.”

“You nearly died,” he says, and it catches in his mouth. “Pulling me from that shuttle.”

“You understand why I couldn’t, all these years? Losing you…”

 She loosens the seal of his uniform jacket, letting the words disappear.

“I couldn’t do it again. Feel it again.”

“And what about now?” He stops her hands at his waistband.

“I told you the truth, there’s nothing left now. And you’re here, and you’re real.”

He lowers his lips to hers, and the kiss spreads fiercely into every nerve of her body, every inch of new skin. She chooses him then, every sinew of her does.

Or she chose him, a long time ago.

She doesn’t really know.

All she knows, as her pain and misery dances away in his arms, is that she feels warmth. Real warmth. For the first time in years.

 


End file.
